JUDGE SIDES WITH CITY ON STREETLIGHTS

Rancho Del Oro group wants city officials to replace rusted fixtures

Rancho Del Oro residents have failed to persuade a judge that city officials should be forced to replace rusting streetlights in their Oceanside neighborhood.

A homeowners group called the Village of Rancho Del Oro Association sued Oceanside after city workers in December 2009 and January 2010 removed 132 Rancho Del Oro streetlights that officials said were so rusted that they were in danger of falling down. The city then refused to replace the decorative lights, which were installed years ago by the developer who built the neighborhood.

Vista Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Stern on Feb. 22 ruled that the city is under no obligation to replace them or to replace the more than 500 rusting streetlights that remain.

City Attorney John Mullen said Friday that if Rancho Del Oro residents want the streetlights replaced, they can agree to pay a special assessment to cover the cost. He said it would cost about $3,500 per pole to replace the lights.

“We’ve always said throughout this lawsuit that there is a mechanism for the lights to be replaced,” Mullen said.

A lawyer for the homeowners association, Rian Jones, said no decision has been made on whether to appeal the judge’s ruling.

Although the ruling means the city has no legal obligation to replace the lights, Jones said the city has a moral obligation to replace them and to do a better job maintaining the remaining lights.

“It just takes a little bit of rust prevention” and ensuring that sprinkler systems don’t soak the base of the poles with water. He said the maintenance could be little more than “a little bit of silicon here, a little bit of Rust-Oleum there.”

Replacing the streetlights is “a health and safety issue for the protection of the citizens out there,” Jones said. “They don’t like living in the dark, they don’t like their streets being dark. Rancho Del Oro, if the city continues doing what they’re doing, will be left without streetlights.”

City officials have projected that Oceanside will have a $1.3 million budget surplus at the end of this fiscal year, and Jones said at least some of that money should go to replacing Rancho Del Oro’s streetlights.

“The association and its members feel their complaints are falling on deaf ears and the only thing that will spur the city of Oceanside into action is if and when there is a problem out there, someone is injured or killed in a traffic accident on a dark street,” Jones said. “The citizens who live in that area don’t want to wait for the horrible to happen before the city is spurred into action.”

The problem goes back to the 1980s when Rancho Del Oro was built and the developer installed decorative streetlights with metal poles instead of the standard city streetlights with concrete poles.

Because they rust, the metal poles last about 20 years compared to about 50 years for concrete poles, according to city officials.

To pay for the maintenance and replacement of streetlights throughout Oceanside, the city formed a citywide street lighting district in 1991 that levies an annual assessment placed on the property tax bills of city homeowners.

On streets with lights, the typical assessment for a single family homeowner is $15.80 per year, according to court documents. The annual assessment is about $3.18 for a typical single-family homeowner in neighborhoods with no streetlights.

In Rancho Del Oro, the annual assessment was reduced to $3.18 for those who live on streets where the lights were removed, the city said in court documents.

In its lawsuit, the Rancho Del Oro Association contended that the city had misappropriated the money raised through the lighting assessment by not properly maintaining Rancho Del Oro streetlights.

The judge found that the city “provided the same level of service” in Rancho Del Oro “as was provided to the streetlights throughout the rest of the city.”

Also, the judge found that requiring the city to replace the streetlights in the neighborhood would give Rancho Del Oro residents an extra benefit at the expense of other city residents.